Modern Ethernet Scaling
Regular Ethernet works at a rate of 10 Mbps. Later or, standards for Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) and Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbps) "ethernet" networks were created, to allow scaling up.
In order to overcome the collisions over the media, switched Ethernet was introduced. In this network, all machines connect to a single switch, which learns which machines are connected to each segment. When a machine sends a packet, the switch only forwards it to the segment containing the target machine. Thus, an Ethernet switch works like an N-way bridge.